Monday, 8 October 2012

Thank you all for following the programme and well done for getting to Thing 23. A short evaluation of the programme is coming soon, but if you're up for a challenge maybe you could come up with a "6 word story" to sum up how you feel about the programme.

Many organisations include some kind of Personal Development Plans (PDP) as part of their staff review/appraisal processes. The idea with these is that you identify some sort of development need, think about how you could fill that gap, and set yourself a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Limited) objective to help you do it. I've put together a quick template that can be used for this, but feel free to tweak it to suit yourself or use one of the many other templates available online.

The Task:

For this last thing, we would like you to reflect on the programme in general and on what you want to do next.

Monday, 1 October 2012

Thing 22: Volunteering to gain experienceHave
you considered working for free to gain experience? For Thing 22 I
reflect on my own experiences of undertaking voluntary work and the potential benefits it
can offer for career development.

My story

Having worked as a library assistant for several years, I finally took the plunge and applied to library school. This meant dropping to part time hours and using a hefty chunk of my savings to study. After graduation, I found myself with more time on my hands and less money in the bank and so began applying
for academic librarian posts in earnest. After several unsuccessful
applications, I was grateful when my employers offered me my full time hours back. Nevertheless, I respectfully
declined their offer even though some of my friends and family thought I was mad.

Although,
my employers were very supportive of my career, I'd pretty much exhausted the limited opportunities to
gain the practical hands-on experience I needed to progress to a professional post. Consequently, I found myself in what Bronagh McCrudden
calls the ‘Experience Catch-22:
the rut you can fall into because you can’t get a job without
experience and you can’t get experience because you can’t get a job.' I
therefore took a bit of a financial gamble and chose to continue working part time and use my free time to gain professional experience through volunteering.

A
colleague kindly used her contacts to help me find my first voluntary
post which involved working two afternoons a week upgrading short
catalogue records for another local university library. Having looked
at the job descriptions for academic librarian posts in my area many required cataloguing experience. I therefore seized the
opportunity to prove that I could put what I had learned during my
Masters course into practice and fill a crucial gap in my CV. But this
was just the beginning.

The benefits of volunteering

As
well as providing an opportunity to gain practical work experience,
volunteering can lead to other opportunities to enhance your CV and kick
start your professional career. Reflecting on my own experience, I believe that it can afford the following benefits to repay you for giving your time for free:

Demonstrate transferable skills and experience

One of my colleagues from the library I was volunteering at invited me to join the planning group for a local Librarian TeachMeet.
This allowed me to give something back by drawing on my experience as a
former training administrator to help organise the event. Having demonstrated that I had
transferable organisational and administrative skills I was later
encouraged to take on the secretary role for the regional CILIP branch committee which has enabled me to become more actively involved in the wider profession and raise my professional profile.

Increase your confidence

After
graduating from library school and finding it hard to get a
professional post I began to doubt my abilities. Helping to organise
the TeachMeet helped me to regain my confidence. The enthusiasm and support of my fellow organisers also inspired me to give a
presentation at the event which is something I doubt I would otherwise have been brave enough to do, especially as the presentations were filmed and uploaded to the wesbite!Develop and showcase your skillsAs an inexperienced speaker, preparing the presentation for the TeachMeet took up a lot of my unpaid time and the prospect of standing up in front of fifty people, some of whom might be potential employers, was pretty terrifying. However, knowing that teachng skills are increasingly in demand for academic librarian posts, I saw it as a chance to brush up on and showcase my presentation skills. It also gave me something to point to in the application for my current post to prove that, despite having no previous teaching experience, I have the necessary skills to deliver an information skills session. It has also given me the confidence to prepare my first session which I have to deliver next week (takes deep breath!).

Extend your professional network and broaden your knowledge of other sectors

Through
my voluntary work I have met colleagues from a variety of different
library and information services which has helped to increase my
knowledge and understanding of other sectors. For instance, another of
the TeachMeet organisers invited me to blog the discussions live at a
symposium exploring patients’ access to and use of online health
information. Although I was not paid for my time, I learned how
librarians are working with health professionals and technologists to
improve the patient experience and gained an insight into an aspect of
information work which was completely new to me. This experience will help me to demonstrate ‘a breadth of professional knowledge
and understanding of the wider professional context’ which is a key assessment
criterion for CILIP Chartership.

Get your foot in the door

Perhaps
the biggest benefit of all is that volunteering helped me to
progress to my first professional post as an Assistant Librarian within the same
university which gave me my first volunteering opportunity. My voluntary
work evidently made an impression on my employers as it was the
first thing I was asked about at interview. Having some
insider knowledge of the university and having met several other
librarians working there also made it much easier to prepare my application
and to settle into my new role when it proved successful.

The potential downsides and further advice

I
strongly believe that volunteering should be a mutually beneficial
arrangement. In exchange for their time and commitment, employers
should provide volunteers with opportunities to gain valuable work
experience and develop their skills. Volunteers should also be
recruited as a complement to, not a substitute for, paid and suitably
qualified library staff. Although this has been my experience,
unfortunately this may not always be the case.

If
you are considering undertaking voluntary work I strongly
recommend that you read Bronagh McCrudden’s prize-winning paper from the 2010 New Professionals Conference: ‘Would you work for free? Unpaid work in the information profession (and how to make it count)’.
This offers case studies of three volunteers’ positive, and not so
positive, experiences and considers the ethics of using volunteers in
libraries. It also gives invaluable practical advice on how to make the
most of working for free as well as sources of further reading.

Over to you…

Have
you undertaken unpaid work to further your career? What was your
experience? Is volunteering a good thing, or by working for free are we
in danger of devaluing our profession? Tell us what you think.